What to do for the best, regarding the countryside? Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

In the latest sermon he has entrusted to Country Lifemagazine, the Prince of Wales returns to a favourite theme: the inability of most of his future subjects to connect with the countryside, or “land”, as its owners generally call this facility. It is not that town dwellers do not treasure the country, he concedes, presumably aware that every survey and the membership of the National Trust tell us that; more that they do not value the countryside in a special way natural to those who know the soil. Urban dwellers might want to picture, for example, Tess of the d’Urbervilles slicing turnips or feeding a mechanical thresher: “The perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words. It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so severely, and began to make her wish that she had never come to Flintcomb-Ash.”

“One of the things that strikes me most forcibly,” the prince writes, “is the majority of the population has lost any real connection with the land.” The British are particularly inadequate in this respect, he thinks, being “now four or five generations removed from anyone who actually worked on the land – and it shows in their attitudes”. Without accusing the non-country bred of wilful damage, the prince suggests that towny ignorance might easily encourage neglect, or worse, of “the rich natural tapestry that is the countryside”. For instance: “It would not only be a folly to lose agricultural land, it would be equally foolish to use it in ways that are not environmentally sustainable in the long term.”

What is the answer? “Somehow,” says the prince, “we need to find a way to put a value on our countryside, with all its facets.”

Assuming he is not a stranger to the sort of countryside valuation readily available in the pages of Country Life, but after something more metaphysical, we can do no better than study the prince’s own methods, as he nurtures large parts of that rich natural tapestry. Many of us are familiar with his rustic experiments at Highgrove, for example, his milk in Waitrose, his grants to hill farmers and his own contribution to Hardy country, the fantasy Poundbury estate once described by Stephen Bayley as “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute”. An anonymous opponent, against further expansion, calls the prince “that rapist of Dorset”. The countryside is full of surprises. Who, for instance, knew that a deep and timeless connection with the land can be compatible with a desire to build executive homes over it?

In Truro, for example, Prince Charles, as current proprietor of the Duchy of Cornwall, not long ago defeated an army of protesters, including every member of Truro council, to build, with his partners at Waitrose, 100 houses, a supermarket and a “Cornish food hall” on what was formerly pasture. In one of several controversial Newquay developments, he is providing 174 more new homes, having reduced the proportion of affordable units to 27.6%, or 48. One councillor told the Bureau for Investigative Journalism: “The bottom line for me is that the Duchy of Cornwall acts like any other developer.”

Earlier, outside Bath, the Duchy terrorised natives with its determination to erect own-brand carbuncles on sustainably farmed land and green belt. In one of many objections to the plan, before it was rejected, the local vicar, Dr Catherine Sourbut, wrote : “The Duchy is clearly enthusiastic about the possibility of the huge financial gain to themselves if the proposed housing development goes ahead on this world heritage site currently owned by them.”

Yet country folk must find some way of living off the rich natural tapestry, regardless of the nonsense spouted by city-based ramblers and conservationists, and Prince Charles is one of many investing in housing estates, where solar panels and wind farms are not a more appropriate revenue-stream. The Country Landowners Association recently issued a lobbying document, Tackling the Housing Crisis in England, in which, contrary to the pro-brownfield arguments compellingly advanced by the CPRE and my colleague, the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins , it laments “the lack of ability to bring land forward for development as a key factor behind historic, long-term housing undersupply”. Recommendations included building on the green belt, as generously supplied by its members, and ignoring “spurious conservation area status” since “good design will mitigate against the visual impact of new housing”. To assist in greenfield building, the CLA urged a reduction in “disproportionate planning regulation”.

The only practical objection, given the anarchic construction that has been assiduously cultivated by the coalition, is how much further the CLA could extend its members’ right to disfigure the landscape before the results drive yet more spectators towards Ukip, thereby endangering continuation of the most developer-friendly government in recent history. Certainly, once Cameron and Osborne are gone, there may never be another Conservative administration so besotted by sprawl and bungalows, to the point that one of their own senior MPs, Nadhim Zahawi, questioned the planning reforms.

Could it really get any better for the CLA, in the absence of any buddhas to blow up, than the trashing of open land next to Stratford-upon-Avon, courtesy of that one-man Taliban, Eric Pickles? Supposing Prince Charles were capable of consistency, his true allies would surely be romantic townies, idealistic about preserving unspoiled and historic landscapes they will never inhabit; his enemies the landowners in and around this government, who are happy to vandalise any shared heritage they can’t see.

Only the sustained opposition of Penshurst villagers, ending in judicial review, prevented, for instance, Viscount De L’isle, a direct descendant of Sir Philip Sidney, from erecting faux Tudor houses in an area of outstanding natural beauty, though not in a spot where it would have intruded on his own tapestry. Again, only after protests and judicial review was the Duke of Gloucester, Charles’s relation, prevented from building a wind farm over Grade 1 listed Lyveden New Bield, c1604-5.

The Tory MP, Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, with a deep countryside connection extending over 7,000 acres of Dorset, showed similar defiance when he faced public opposition to a 175-acre wind farm. The prime minister’s cousin by marriage, Philip Shirley, is still hoping for an executive estate on land owned by his family since the Domesday Book. In Somerset, another ancestrally qualified countryman, the Marquess of Bath, intends to run a cable car across the Cheddar Gorge, complementing the landscape celebrated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As much as one regrets the ignorance of reed-bed sanitation or organic cheesemaking afflicting most city dwellers, most of us are, at a guess, innocent of comparable barbarism.

But how do we find a way to put a value on our countryside? We could always learn from that most connected of countrymen, Sir Reginald Sheffield, 8th baronet and David Cameron’s father-in-law, whose hugely unpopular wind farms, on one of his less favoured estates, earn him £1,000 a day.